11/8/2022 0 Comments 70s playboy magazineI came back and said, for God’s sake, let’s get rid of it!” “l took a whole briefcase full of those sleazy magazines home with me – Playboy, Dude, Gent, Nugget, Cavalier – and I discovered that the one thing they had in common was the gatefold, the fold-out center spread. “I remember it was over the Fourth of July,” says Gingrich. Gingrich had tried to prune the raunchiness a bit, yet Playboymagazine, a far raunchier, three-year-old upstart, had already built up two-thirds of the Esquire circulation and was gaining fast. “The visual side had become absurdly over-emphasized. This formula had pushed Esquire to a circulation of 800,000, but Gingrich was not happy. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules' Gingrich was the editor of Esquire, a sophisticated mix of prestigious writing, upwardly mobile storytelling and such spicy artwork as the Petty Girl, the Vargas Girl and photographic spreads of, for instance, Anita Ekberg, laid out on Gingrich’s own invention: the centerfold. It was the summer ’56, and Arnold Gingrich had a problem. Western Civilization was not yet ready for pubic hair. “Of course we couldn’t go ahead with it.” “It was just something for the advertisers,” a surviving executive recalled. On one of the center pages was a female nude, frontal full as anything and untroubled by the airbrush. The problem was this feature devoted to the camera of Paul Outerbridge Jr. Just off the press was the dummy of his new magazine Rehearsal, ultimately it would be called Life. It was the summer of ’36, and Henry Luce had a problem. This is Part 1 of the story, titled ‘The Pubic-Hair Papers,’ that originally appeared in the December 20th, 1973 issue of Rolling Stone.
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